New fast and area-efficient pipeline 3-D DCT architectures.

The efficient implementation of 3-D transforms is a challenging task due to the computation complexity, memory and area requirements of such transforms. One important 3-D transform is the 3-D Discrete Cosine Transform (3-D DCT) used in many image and video processing systems. In this paper, two new pipeline architectures for the 3-D DCT computation using the 3-D DCT Vector-Radix algorithm (3-D DCT VR) are presented. These architectures are scalable and parameterisable with regards to different wordlengths and pipelining levels. Their arithmetic component requirements are reduced to the order of O(log2⁡N) in contrast with O(N) for 3-D DCT architectures in the literature, while at the same time they can keep similar or better area-time complexity.